🚀 go-pugleaf

Let me use Marcus's comment as a jumping-off point; this is not a personal
attack.

> What makes having the hardware documented "Open"?? It seems to
> me that you're defining an "Open System" as any system which you can
> *FIX* yourself if you don't like what the vendor's done with it. Some
> of us prefer to just change vendors.

I'm a system programmer, so that biases my opinions.  I certainly want
to be able to fix broken software.  I also want the option of not
running the vendor's software; not all of us are buying Application
Delivery Vehicles.  Changing vendors would be a good idea if there were
any vendors not currently selling ADVs (I think MIPS was the last,
though possibly HP still qualifies).

But my real objection to the abuse of the term "open system" has less
to do with computing than with linguistic abuse.  Computing is
notorious for linguistic abuse and content-free buzzwords, but this
case is pretty astonishing even by the lax standards of computing.
Here we have two simple English words.  "System" of course became
content-free years ago and now means little more than "a bag of stuff"
(or as Stan Kelly-Bootle puts it in The Devil's DP Dictionary, "any old
ratbag of incompatible components").  The word "open" has all sorts of
warm fuzzy connotations of goodness (not counting Sun's innovation of
Open Security, which culminated in the 386i: `pahss-words?  we don't
need no steenkin' pahss-words.'), which vendors clearly want to tap,
yet it actually has denotations, notably "not closed or blocked up or
sealed or locked", "not covered or concealed or restricted" and "frank,
communicative" (The Oxford Paperback Dictionary).  I am deeply and
negatively impressed that Sun or SGI can call their systems "open", wth
straight faces, when they don't offer anything comparable to the
Digital PDP-11/70 Processor Handbook, which described the instruction
set, addressing and memory management unit, memory system, floating
point processor, I/O controllers, console, kernel memory map including
device addresses, and device register bit layouts, in sufficient detail
to implement an operating system when read in conjunction with the
Peripherals Handbook, and without "open system" hype, and all in only
276 pages.

But perhaps I am being naive and old-fashioned and should look instead
at the other meanings of "open": "admitting visitors or customers",
"with wide spaces between solid parts", and "not yet settled or
decided" (The Oxford Paperback Dictionary again).

``Kiss the ladies, shake hands with the fellows,
and it's Open For Business like a cheap bordello'' - Bruce Cockburn
-- 
Geoff Collyer		world.std.com!geoff, uunet.uu.net!geoff

``Leave the evil grasping to us.'' - A. L. Arms, UNIX licensing, WECo.